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OUR SPEAKERS
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Dr. Vanessa Julia Carpenter is a designer, researcher, author and women’s health innovation specialist working at the intersection of emerging technology, design and health.
She is the author of Designing Femtech, an upcoming design-led exploration of women’s health devices based on 30 case studies with companies, investors, researchers and practitioners from across the global femtech ecosystem.
Vanessa is a co-founder and board member of the Nordic Women’s Health Hub, a founding partner of Femtech Studios and co-founder and editor of Femtech News EU. She is also a member of the Danish Design Council and has spent more than 15 years working with emerging technologies, hardware prototyping, design research and innovation.
With a PhD in Designing for Meaningfulness in Future Smart Products, Vanessa speaks about the future of technology, AI and health, femtech and women’s health innovation, wearables and health data, and how we design technologies that respond to real bodies, lives and needs.
Her talks combine research, real-world examples and a designer’s perspective on where technology is taking us, and what we should be questioning as we build what comes next.
Vanessa Julia Carpenter
Women's Health Innovation Advisor
English, Danish
Languages:
Location:
Copenhagen, Denmark
Can also give an online talk/webinar
Paid only. Contact speaker for pricing!
MY TALKS
Designing Femtech: What Women’s Health Can Teach Us About Better Technology
Design, Product, Diversity and Inclusion, Women in Tech, Innovation, Inspirational
Women’s health is experiencing a surge in technological innovation, from wearables and diagnostic devices to pelvic health tools, fertility technologies and new approaches to menopause. But building technology for bodies and experiences historically underserved by research and design raises some fundamental questions: What happens when the data we need does not exist? How do we design for physiology rather than assumptions? And what can the wider technology industry learn from femtech?
Drawing on research for her book Designing Femtech, based on 30 case studies with companies, investors, researchers and practitioners across the women’s health ecosystem, Dr. Vanessa Julia Carpenter explores how teams are designing products in areas where the evidence, infrastructure and established design conventions are still evolving.
Through real examples, she examines designing with intimate and sensitive data, building hardware for diverse bodies, designing for pain and discomfort, validating emerging technologies, and involving users meaningfully throughout development.
The talk offers lessons that extend well beyond femtech: how to build more thoughtful, evidence-aware and meaningful technologies for complex human lives.
Designing for Meaningfulness in Future Technology & AI
Data / AI / ML, Design, Product, Innovation, Inspirational
We are very good at asking whether a new technology is possible. We are less consistent at asking whether it deserves a place in people’s lives.
As AI, connected products, wearables and intelligent systems become increasingly embedded in everyday life, designers and technologists face a different challenge: how do we create technology that people find genuinely meaningful rather than simply novel, efficient or technically impressive?
Drawing on her PhD research into meaningfulness in future smart products and more than 15 years of work with emerging technologies and hardware prototyping, Dr. Vanessa Julia Carpenter explores how meaning is created through the relationship between technology, context, behaviour and human values.
The talk examines the gap between technological possibility and lived experience, why more data does not automatically create better understanding, and how prototyping can help teams investigate the consequences of emerging technologies before they become products.
It offers a design-led framework for asking better questions about AI and future technology: Who is this for? What changes when it enters someone’s life? What assumptions are embedded in it? And what would make it genuinely worth having?
Embracing Diversity: AI and Inclusive Innovation
Data / AI / ML, Innovation, Inspirational, Design
AI systems learn from the world we give them. When the underlying data, research or assumptions fail to represent the people a technology is meant to serve, those gaps can become embedded in the products we build.
This is particularly visible in health, where women have historically been underrepresented in research and where differences relating to sex, hormones, age, ethnicity and life stage can materially affect both data and outcomes. But the problem is much broader than health.
Dr. Vanessa Julia Carpenter explores what inclusive innovation means in an era of AI, moving beyond diversity as a final-stage checklist and looking instead at the decisions made throughout research, data collection, product development and design.
Using examples from emerging technology and women’s health, she examines how teams can identify whose experiences are missing, recognise assumptions hidden inside data and systems, and use design research and prototyping to expose blind spots earlier.
The talk challenges organisations to think more critically about who becomes the assumed user of a technology, and shows how designing for greater human variation can lead to more robust products, better questions and stronger innovation.
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